Roofing in Kansas City, MO

Kansas City is not one roofing market, it's a dozen stitched together. A steep slate-look Tudor in Sunset Hill has nothing in common with a 1950s ranch off 63rd Street, and neither one is built like the two-story that went up in the Northland last spring. The city's housing stock spans more than a hundred years, which means a roofer working here has to be fluent in old framing and new code at the same time. We have been doing it since 1947.

The oldest neighborhoods, Hyde Park, Coleman Highlands, parts of the Northeast, are full of steep-pitch roofs with original decking that is board rather than sheathing. That matters. Board decking has gaps, and when a tear-off exposes cupped or split boards you cannot just nail over them and hope. Midtown bungalows in Waldo and Brookside usually run two or three layers deep because someone shingled over instead of tearing off in the eighties. South of the river the ranch stock from the fifties has shallow pitch and long runs, which makes ventilation the deciding factor in how long the next roof lasts.

Kansas City sits in the part of the country where hail season and wind season overlap. Spring storms roll in from the west across open Kansas ground and hit the metro with nothing to slow them down. We see the same pattern every year: a line comes through in April or May, the phone starts at dawn, and half the calls are from people whose neighbors already had a crew on the roof. Winter brings the other half of the problem. Freeze-thaw cycles work water under shingles that are already brittle, and ice dams form on the north-facing slopes of houses with poor attic ventilation.